Several types of PCs as well as various types of mobile devices using such platforms as Windows OS of Microsoft, OS X of Apple, and Linux OS etc. are prevailing in the recent software market. Demands on diverse applications not only for the PCs but also for the mobile devices are growing rapidly. As a result, a huge market is formed for the diverse applications including both free applications and paid applications. Besides, considerable number of the applications encompassing the applications for personal use and those for enterprises, e.g. web server, WAS, databases, and middleware, are available in the market. To try out the respective applications requires users to go through complicated environmental settings and to be equipped with appropriate infrastructure for services, e.g. high-end servers and storages, and thus a lot of times and resources are consumed.
From the users' point of view, selecting an application for use among the diverse applications is a hard choice due to that the users who want to make use of the application need to determine whether or not the application meets a usage end. A lot of applications with similar functions are constantly being released in the software market, and it is difficult for the users to exactly decide if the functions of an application are appropriate ones by only referring to product information provided by providers of the application. Conventionally, the users directly download a few applications for the purpose of trials and try them out to determine if the applications are worth purchasing if the applications are of paid applications. In such a case, when the applications downloaded and tried out by the users are not the ones that the users need, the users have to uninstall the applications, which causes inconveniences to the users.
Furthermore, if the users purchase an application that provides numerous functions, a variety of functions except for those required by the users may be used later, but the problem is that the more functions the application provides, the more it costs in most of the cases. Even for applications with similar or the same functions, price range of the applications may be wide. And it is preferable to purchase the applications with reasonable and affordable price.
Besides, after buying an application that the users need a while later, it is required for the users to download and install the application having been upgraded to figure out functions having been added into the application, since it is difficult for the users to figure out the functions having been added by merely referring to the descriptions of update contents.
There are lots of application products with new functionalities, friendly user interface, and reasonable prices among recently released applications. However, from the users' point of view, it is cumbersome and annoying for the users to install the products on a PC or a mobile device for the purpose of trial and uninstall them from the PC or the mobile device every time after trying out those products.
Moreover, in case of installing the latest software applications, there may be restrictions for the installation of the applications depending on computing environments, e.g. recommended hardware specification of a terminal which may be a PC or a mobile device and recommended network bandwidth etc. Or there may be a case that the users may no longer utilize the applications due to the trial periods are expired before the users fully explore the functions of the applications.
Therefore, the present invention intends to propose a method for configuring a trial environment in a way of software provisioning to enable the users to easily use a variety of free and paid applications in a virtual environment of a cloud system and using the configured applications immediately and a server using the same method.